Is your organization hoping to turn everything around with amazing new brand standards? A look that's perfectly in tune with your mission, and a mission statement that captures what you do in an exciting way?
You're going to be disappointed.
The only way to really improve your brand is to improve your donors' experience.
That's the important point made recently on Jason's Blog, at Frictionless, convenient, and emotional: branding your donor experience. Brand is a lot more about what your donors experience than what you say:
... we tend to think about branding at the institutional level. It's something that happens magically in the macro. But the truth is that your institution's brand boils down to how individuals perceive you and what they say about you when you aren't around. Building a strong and positive brand is an individual by individual challenge.
That means you have:
- Great fundraising offers that excite and empower donors.
- Client-focused communication -- you talk to them, not yourself.
- Clean, error-free donor data.
- Flawless donor service.
That would be a nonprofit brand that captures donors and keeps them.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. 
